Saving to MP3 with LAME on Audacity 2.0.0 Windows 7

Audacity Help Forum Windows
1

Hello.
I’m using Audacity 2.0.0 on Windows 7 for making a MP3 file (don’t remember exe or zip file was downloaded).
Is this page still actual: http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/lame_legal_issues.html?
Can now users from Russia use LAME in Audacity for saving MP3 for commercial use legally?

2

We are not lawyers, and the patent / copyright issues around MP3 technology remain horribly complicated and controversial. This is what Wikipedia has to say on the issue; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3#Licensing_and_patent_issues

Personally I prefer to avoid the whole issue by using open formats whenever possible, such as Flac and Ogg Vorbis.
https://xiph.org/flac/
http://www.vorbis.com/

3

The Audacity Team doesn’t distribute LAME. You have to get LAME from a different website and since you probably didn’t pay for it, obviously nobody is paying the royalties and it’s obviously unlicensed.

I’ve NEVER heard of anyone getting in trouble for USING an unlicensed MP3 encoder, they only go after you if you DISTRIBUTE IT. (If you go to the official LAME website, you will only find the source code. You can’t download a compiled-working copy of LAME from the official website.)

As far as I know, you can’t buy a stand-alone copy of LAME. But some applications, such as dBpoweramp come with a full-licensed MP3 encoder.

Distribution of MP3 encoded files s is covered by a different license. But, you only have to pay royalties if your annual revenue exceeds $100,000 USD.

See [u]MP3Licensing.com[/u].

4

Thanks!
Do you know what patents are used in LAME? I can see info on them.

obviously nobody is paying the royalties and it’s obviously unlicensed.

What I’ve found is that such apps that use paid licenses allow users to commercially use MP3s.
From one user of Audacity I’ve info that it’s free…
It seems that it will depend only on this what algorithms does the .dll use. Yes?

5

Maybe you can say does the possibilty of commercial using of MP3 created with encoder depends ONLY on what patents (algorithms) are used for it, and whether are they still active in given country?
Then I could look whether such patents are still active for Russia

6

This forum is the help forum for Audacity software,
We are unable to offer legal advice.
Should you require legal advice, you will need to consult a legal professional.

Topic locked.